April is National Poetry Month and we’ll be sharing a variety of “locally grown” poetry with you over the next four issues of OLLI Connects. And you’ll be able to enjoy it all from the comfort of your home computer. Or on your smartphone. On the sofa. With your feet up.
It wasn’t always this easy to make poetry available to OLLI members. Let Ara take you back to the distant past of the previous millennium and remind you of how it used to be done. — Editor
Ara Rogers
“Hans wants to produce a book of poems by his class. I told him you would work on this with him.”
It was early 1996 and I was working with the Learning in Retirement Institute as a part-time graduate assistant. Hans Juergensen had retired several years earlier, and he was a “get” for LIR. Hired in 1961 as faculty in the Humanities, Hans had been a consultant to the Nobel Prize Committee on Literature, and was an esteemed poet. Lee, renowned for her arm-twisting abilities, had worked on Hans for a while to get him to try teaching for LIR, a program now in its second year. Hans agreed to focus on poetry writing. (More…)
